Heidelberg Cement is aiming to achieve savings of €600million over the next three years through a new operational and financial strategy branded FOX 2013.
"The continued and consistent focus on cash and cost is a key success factor of our company strategy," explained Heidelberg CEO Dr Bernd Scheifele. "Building on our strong cost and efficiency track record in recent years, we have bundled several cash and cost saving projects in the new three-year financial and operational excellence programme.
Main focus of the programme is on global efficiency improvement for the core activities aggregates and cement. For cement production, Heidelberg wants to achieve a sustainable reduction of energy cost through the OPEX programme (Operational Excellence). In the aggregates business, the company aims to achieve sustainable margin improvements and best practice through comprehensive global benchmarking and portfolio optimisations.
"We are already the global market leader in aggregates by sales volumes, but now we also want to become the most efficient aggregates producer in the world," said Scheifele. "In addition, we plan to further reduce our financing cost and have already laid the basis for this in November 2010 with the reduction of the credit margins for our ?3billion revolving credit facility. On top of that, we target annual savings from purchasing and an optimisation of our working capital, largely derived from DPO improvements in 2011. With our FOX 2013 programme we will further strengthen our competitiveness in order to benefit even more from an improving global market environment for building materials."
